Sheila vs Mamata: Does Didi get too much flak for rape cases?

The Delhi police on Thursday said that a woman was gang-raped in a moving car and three minors were raped in separate incidents in the last three days in New Delhi. Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien was quick to react to this report on his Twitter account. “In 2013, an average of 4 rapes a day in Delhi.Yet no Sheila Dixit bashing by the chatterati. Special immunity for some CMs?” he tweeted. [caption id=“attachment_651490” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Mamata Banerjee and Sheila Dikshit. Agencies[/caption] O’Brien’s tweet was a jab at the criticism heaped upon Mamata Banerjee by the social media following the Park Street rape case and her reaction to it. There has hardly been any special immunity for Dikshit. She was widely criticised by the public and the media after the Delhi gangrape incident, for trying to shift blame to the Delhi police. “A woman is gang raped, brutalised with an iron rod, her intestines are pulverized, she is stripped and thrown out of a moving bus in her city and the CM comes up with the assurance of a committee. At a moment when a chief minister could be a leader, Dikshit managed to come across as a tone-deaf bureaucrat whose only job was to duck blame,” Firstpost editor Sandip Roy had written in an article. Dikshit was even booed out of Jantar Mantar when she wanted to pay homage to the Delhi gangrape victim on the day she died. When Dikshit reached Jantar Mantar at 2pm with her security personnel, the crowd erupted in anger, forcing her to leave the place almost immediately, Hindustan Times had reported. “I wanted to express my grief,” the report quoted Dikshit. But, Dikshit, had at least accepted that such an incident had occured and there was a need for the administration and the police to buck up, unlike Banerjee, who had rubbished the Park Street rape case as a conspiracy and not ‘real’ rape. An India Today report had quoted Banerjee as saying, “The incident is false. The woman underwent medical tests and nothing was found. She happens to be the wife of a CPM leader.” The insensitive statement by Banerjee, but of course, invited the ire of the social media and the public. Twitter was abuzz with people expressing shock over her statement. Be it rapes, crib deaths or a hospital fire, Banerjee has always put herself in the limelight with her refusal to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong in West Bengal. Instead of making, or at least promising to make changes in her administration, she has shifted blame on others. If not an outrageous statement, she chooses to keep mum on burning issues. And maybe that’s the real issue.